Academic Articles (2011 – present)
Automatic Racism: Emoji, Normativity and the Big Fail of the Predetermined Universal User (ADesk, 2019)
In this article, I analyze how the design of emojis reveals and reproduces racial and gender normativities. From the evolution of the first emoji sets to the updates that incorporated skin tones and diverse couples, I show that what is presented as neutral actually presupposes whiteness and masculinity as the default. My aim is to connect this critique with user experience (UX), emphasizing that cultural and social contexts directly shape the way we interpret even the most everyday symbols. For this reason, I argue that a simple emoji can become both a mirror of structural inequalities and a battleground for representation and inclusion.read article
Retrieving from My Digital Body: A Map of Abuse and Solidarity (Feminist Media Histories, 2017)
In this article, I present the project BodyArchive, a digital cartography created in the context of my doctoral research to explore the connections between abuse, solidarity, and memory in online environments. The research draws on the idea of the body as archive —inspired by McLuhan and Preciado— and on the concept of warm data as a counterpoint to the coldness of official statistics. The project collected and codified data shared by feminist networks on Facebook between 2015 and 2016, building a creative archive in which individual experiences became collective documents.My goal was to bring specificity and humanity to data, while also showing how feminist communities generate strategies of resistance and support in the face of digital and institutional violence. Through network visualizations and digital autoethnography methodologies, I argued that personal experience can be transformed into shared knowledge, and that the creative archive is a political tool for rethinking the role of memory, design, and justice in the digital age.
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Música i tecnologia: l’eclosió del virtual en la composició sonora (Trípodos, 2010)
In this article, co-written with Pol Creuheras and Cristian Palazzi, I reflect on the relationship between music and technology as a paradigm for understanding the emergence of the virtual in contemporary society. We traced how, from Cahill’s Telharmonium and Moog’s first synthesizers to the democratization of software and the personal computer, music has become a privileged space for technological experimentation.
I analyze how the use of synthesizers, programs such as Ableton Live, or protocols like MIDI have blurred the boundaries between highbrow and popular music, and how the internet has opened pathways for collective creation and mass access to composition tools. The article argues that the alliance between music and technology is not only instrumental but cultural: music serves to understand processes of virtualization, the objectification of sound, and the transformation of contemporary sensibility.
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Recorregut 45. Art contemporani i societat informacional (Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2010)
This commission led me to reflect on contemporary art produced during the first decade of the 21st century, in a context marked by the rise of the internet, globalization, and new digital imaginaries. In this overview, I analyze how artists of the period responded to events that profoundly shaped our collective memory —from the turn of the millennium and the Y2K fears of technological collapse to the visual and symbolic impact of 9/11 and the images from Abu Ghraib— and how these events translated into new artistic languages.
In the text, I explore the idea that the informational society produces an almost infinite multimedia memory, and that art not only collects its fragments but also reconfigures them. From intimate, autobiographical practices to institutional critique projects and experiments with digital hyperreality, I argue that the art of the first decade of the 21st century is not only a reflection of its time, but also a testing ground for rethinking how we live, remember, and relate in an increasingly mediated world.
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Proposta ètica sobre el conflicte de la representació visual de la guerra en l’era digital (Trípodos, 2009)
This article analyzes the ethical dilemmas of visually representing war in a context shaped by the digital revolution and the immediacy of information. Building on Susan Sontag’s reflections and the work of artists and journalists such as Jeff Wall, Alfredo Jaar, Gervasio Sánchez, and Michael Winterbottom, the text explores how speed and image saturation affect our ability to interpret the suffering of others.
The research argues for the need for new strategies of presentation that recover the time, context, and ethical intention behind each image, emphasizing honest and competent practices that respect the dignity of the subjects portrayed. The article concludes that, in the digital age, the key to a responsible representation of war lies in honesty, professional independence, and the ability to generate spaces of understanding between what has been lived, what is shown, and what is interpreted.
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